Chandra X-ray Observations of Mergers found in the Zoo Published
I hope you all had clear skies during the Transit of Venus. If not, it’ll be over a hundred years before you get another chance…. and in Zoo-related news, the Transit of Venus is an example of one way we find planets around other stars. We look for a dip in the brightness of the star as a planet moves across it from our point of view. Want to know more? Head over to the Planethunters blog, or put in some clicks looking for transits yourself!
So, in actual Galaxy Zoo news, I am very happy to report that the latest Galaxy Zoo study has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. As we blogged a while back, we got Chandra X-ray time to observe a small sample of major mergers found by the Galaxy Zoo to look for double black holes. The idea is to look for the two black holes presumably brought into the merger by the two galaxies and see if we find both of them feeding by looking for them with an X-ray telescope (i.e. Chandra).
The lead author of the paper is Stacy Teng, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and an expert on X-ray data analysis. In a sample of 12 merging galaxies, we find just one double active nucleus.
Image of the one merger with two feeding black holes. The white contours are the optical (SDSS) image while the pixels are X-rays. The red pixels are soft (low energy) X-ray photons, while the blue are hard (high energy) photons. You can see that both nuclei of the merger are visible in X-rays emitted by feeding supermassive black holes.
We submitted the resulting paper to the Astrophysical Journal where it underwent peer review. The reviewer suggested some changes and clarifications and so the paper was accepted for publication.
You can find the full paper in a variety of formats, including PDF, on the arxiv.
So what’s next? We submitted a proposal, led by Stacy, for the current Chandra cycle. To do a bigger, more comprehensive search for double black holes in mergers to put some real constraints on their abundance and properties. We hope to hear about whether the proposal is approved some time later this summer, so stay tuned and follow us on Twitter for breaking news!
First X-ray Data of the Mergers with Chandra
I just got notice from the people at the Chandra Science Center that Chandra has executed the observation of the first Galaxy Zoo merger – part of our study to understand black holes in mergers. This is the first of twelve such observations that should take place over the next year or so. The main science question we have that this program will help us answer is: in how many mergers do both black holes feed?
All I have at the moment are the quick-look data that that they sent me. They are more or less raw images. Here is the full frame:
And here is a zoom-in:
This is raw data, rather than properly analyzed data, so we can’t really draw any firm conclusions based on it yet, but it seems like there is no significant source detected. What does that mean? Assuming that there really is no source after we properly analyze the data, then the black hole(s) in this particular merger are either not feeding very much, or they are hidden behind lots of gas and dust.
For now, we will wait for the actual data to fully analyze it, and for the remaining 11 targets to be observed.
Chandra Program to study Galaxy Zoo Mergers approved
Good news, everyone!
Earlier this year we submitted a proposal to use the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe a set of merging galaxies in X-rays. The target list for Cycle 12 has just been released, and with a bit of scanning, you can find a set of targets with names like “GZ_Merger_AGN_1”. These targets are a set of beautiful merging galaxies discovered by YOU as part of Galaxy Zoo 1 and the Merger Hunt. The 12 approved targets are here:
These 12 mergers are all very pretty, but they have something else in common: they all host active galactic nuclei (AGN) – feeding supermassive black holes at their centers. X-rays are great for finding such hungry black holes, but we already know that all 12 of these mergers are AGN, so why observe them again? We’re looking for a mythical rare beast: the binary AGN!
Only a handful of these objects are known and they were discovered by chance. We believe that every massive galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center and so when two galaxies merge, then there should be two black holes around for a while, that is, until they merge. The goal of our Chandra study of these 12 mergers is to systematically search for binary AGN in merging galaxies to work out what fraction of them feature two feeding black holes. Knowing whether such phases are common or not is important for understanding how black holes interact with galaxies in mergers and what exactly happens to them as they plunge towards the center of the new galaxies where they are doomed to merge and form a single supermassive black hole.
As usual, it may be quite a while before we get the data. The observing cycle won’t start for a while and takes about a year. Since our observations are short and we don’t have any time constraints (they’re galaxies, they don’t move!) the Chandra operators will most likely schedule our observations in between longer projects and time sensitive observations and so we won’t know when they will happen. Of course, once we do get the data, we’ll definitely update you.
Oh and you might notice some of the targets in the Merger Zoo in the near future. We’ll need your help to fully understand them….
Galaxy Zoo 